Makers of war: the ordinary men turned bomb technicians in Syria

In Aleppo, Syria, a rebel builds Molotov cocktail–like incendiary bombs in an abandoned school

Moises Saman

This article was taken from the September 2013
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Abu Yassin pulls open the heavy iron gate of the school and
steps back. "Peace be upon you," he says in Arabic, grinning and
extending a hand, his arm stained to the elbow with aluminium
powder. "Welcome, welcome." He turns and waves for me to follow. We
walk along a short pathway toward the front door, past an
assortment of ordnance laid out on the concrete, bombs that fell
from the sky but failed to explode: an ovoid 88-millimetre mortar
shell; a big, 200kg one with twisted tail-fins; a neat row of
pale-grey Russian cluster bomblets, their nose-fuses removed.
"Later! I will open them later!" he says, eyebrows waggling with
anticipation.

The four-storey school is shaped like a C around a set of
basketball courts, paved with stone tiles and pocked at the far end
with small, dark craters. A set of white plastic lawn chairs and a
table have been arranged in the central courtyard near the door
leading into the school. A young boy walks over. "Let's see, coffee
or tea?" Yassin says, distracted, contemplating the plastic
furniture. Another assistant, an older man in a filthy smock, comes
out and stands beside us holding a silver cylinder the size of a
soda bottle. It's wrapped in clear plastic tape and sprouts a red
fuse, which the man proceeds to light. The fuse sputters as he
steps forward and pitches the cylinder underhand across the
courtyard, where it bounces and rolls to a halt some 30 metres
away.

Abu Yassin, a former network engineer, now one of Aleppo's weapon-makers

Moises Saman

"Explosion!" he yells as Yassin looks on. With a deafening clap,
the bomb bursts in a cloud of flame and smoke, buffeting our faces
with a pressure wave. Yassin scurries forward and crouches on his
haunches to examine the crater it leaves. Slowly he walks back,
shaking his head. "Very bad, very bad," he mutters -- but then,
remembering his guest, his expression brightens to a smile.
"Please, sit down."

The conflict in Aleppo, like the wider civil
war in Syria, has been mired in stalemate for more than a year.
The rebels moved into the country's largest city in the late summer
of 2012, seizing nearly two-thirds of it within a couple of weeks.
Since then, though, regime and rebels have stayed locked in
grinding urban warfare. The business of Aleppo's inhabitants has
become violence -- and Abu Yassin has bent his unusual ingenuity to
that task. A former network engineer, he has become one of Aleppo's
premier bomb makers, part of a burgeoning homemade-weapons industry
that has sustained the Syrian revolution. Yassin's factory inside
the abandoned school churns out tens of kilogrammes of explosives
every day, and he is constantly seeking innovative ways of killing
people.

After we settle into the plastic chairs, the boy returns bearing
a tray of Turkish coffee. From half a kilometre away, we can hear
gunfire and shelling at the front line -- the thump of outgoing artillery, the crunch of incoming.
Periodically, the older assistant returns and lobs another bomb
into the courtyard, its blast interrupting our conversation as bits
of concrete plink against the plastic table. Yassin then wanders
over to inspect the crater, squatting down like a tracker on his
quarry's trail. The bomb maker added nitrocellulose to his mix
today, in a bid to give his explosives more power; now he is
checking the craters for residual ammonium nitrate, which would
indicate an inefficient reaction.

A selection of Abu Yassin's homemade bombs.

Moises Saman

Soon three more guests arrive, led in by Yassin's younger
brother Abu Ali. (Abu means "father of" in Arabic, and many rebels
take their son's name as a nom de guerre.) Ali, who runs the
business half of the operation, owned a small shopping mall in
Aleppo before the war; he is jowly and unshaven, clad in a
tattered, calf-length leather trench coat and a cream turtleneck
sweater streaked with grease. He has brought with him a rebel
commander, a stout man wearing a pistol in a shoulder holster,
along with two of the commander's men. They have just come from a
nearby front line. "I need 50 of every kind of bomb," the commander
tells Yassin, who nods toward his assistants.

As the soldiers ferry arm-loads of homemade grenades to their
waiting car, Yassin and the commander walk into what was once the
principal's office. Now hanging on the wall above the desk is the
rebel tricolour -- green, white and black, with three red stars --
and below it a black flag with a Muslim profession of faith written
out in stark white Arabic script, the kind of flag displayed by
Islamist groups linked to al Qaeda. The centre of the room is
dominated by a long wooden table upon which lie samples of Yassin's
homemade wares: mortar shells, detonators, antitank mines, bottles of
foul-smelling ammonium and napalm, shotgun-launched grenades and
hand-thrown bombs of various shapes and sizes. In the corner stands
a robot stippled in green camouflage, with four wheels and a single
arm ending in a claw. The commander tells Yassin about an upcoming
operation to capture a mosque held by the regime.

Yassin nods and strokes his beard. Already he is calculating
exactly which explosives and mines will be most useful, how much
they will cost, and how he will balance this commander's demands
with the needs of the dozens of other rebel groups that come to him
each week, desperate for weapons. After two years of
increasingly vicious combat, the civil war has become a battle of
annihilation, one increasingly tainted by sectarian extremism and
human-rights abuses on both sides. Nearly 100,000 people have died,
and the rebels all know that they too will likely join the dead if
the government of Bashar al-Assad prevails. Once, they led ordinary
lives, many of them in the ranks of the middle or professional
classes, but those days are gone. They fight for their lives and
for their country, but Abu Yassin is also fighting for his own
redemption -- for a victory that might justify, in retrospect, the
dark purpose to which he has turned his prodigious powers of
invention.

After the commander leaves, Yassin sits down at the desk. He is
wearing a grey tracksuit, and his dark, matted curls are covered by
a faded orange-and-black-check cotton keffiyeh that he wears over
his head like a bandana, winding the tails across his brow. This,
together with his fur-lined vest, lends him a rustic air, but he
speaks in the lengthy, didactic manner of a professor. When asked a
question, he often looks upward in calculation, drums his fingers
against his beard, and then mutters a rhetorical "OK" before he
launches into an answer. His high cheekbones are sun-darkened and
gaunt, and as he speaks his eyes bulge and narrow with the
intensity of a mad prophet.

Yassin talks about the day when it first seemed possible Assad
could fall. He had been working in Lebanon, building and
maintaining the corporate IT network of a firm in Beirut. He was
splitting his time between a Beirut apartment and a home in the
nearby Syrian capital of Damascus, where his wife and two children
lived. Though the average Syrian had suffered under decades of
economic stagnation and isolation, Yassin's yearly salary was
roughly $25,000 (£17,000), which meant he lived well. When the Arab
Spring arrived and unrest in Egypt and Libya spread to Syria, and the army was ordered into the
streets, Yassin couldn't believe what he was watching. Glued to Al
Jazeera in his Beirut apartment, he was amazed at the mayhem in the
Syrian streets, the open defiance of Assad.

Workers assemble grenades at a makeshift factory in a rebel-held district of Aleppo

Moises Saman

Even then he regarded this unrest as an interested spectator,
not a participant. But toward the end of 2011 the uprising became
an armed rebellion. Resistance hardened among the Sunni Muslims
(roughly 75 percent of Syria's population), who had grown tired of
rule by Alawites, a sect that represents just one-eighth of Syrians
but happens to include the two men, Hafez al-Assad and now his son,
who have ruled the nation since 1970. Yassin is from a Sunni family
in Aleppo, and his brother and parents still lived in the city; as
the killing there escalated, he was drawn into the fight. He
resigned from his job, returned to Damascus and kissed his wife and
children goodbye -- that was the last time he saw them. Then he
drove 320 kilometres north, into the civil war.

By the time he arrived, he found that Ali had already joined
fighters in the south of the city, in the working-class
neighbourhood of Salaheddine. Yassin initially volunteered as an
ambulance driver, which let him witness firsthand the human
sacrifice the rebels were making. His first ambulance was hit by a
mortar shell just seconds after he got out of it. His second went
up in flames after its fuel tank was shot while he was driving.

Meanwhile, he observed that his brother's group of fighters
suffered primarily for lack of weapons. The Salaheddine group had
85 pump-action shotguns that had been smuggled in from abroad, as
well as three dozen Kalashnikov assault rifles they had captured
from the regime. Against them, Assad had a well equipped,
professional army. One day Yassin was in the headquarters of the
katiba -- the local battalion, which does its best to supply bands
of fighters -- and watched as a commander arrived and asked for
ammunition. The commander was allotted just 50 bullets for his
entire team; he would be sending his men to die. Yassin's mind was
working. He had no military experience. As a young man, he had
studied to be a lawyer. Then he had worked as a sales
representative for a commercial expo and trade-fair company. After
that he had gone back to school to study network engineering.

Now 39, he would reinvent himself again. He and Ali left
frontline combat to build a new operation, which they dubbed the
Military Engineering Katiba. As startup capital, they used the
savings they'd accumulated before the war. They couldn't
manufacture rifle rounds, but they could make explosives and
grenades to help their fighters conserve ammunition. Using the
contacts they had built with other rebel units, they were granted
use of the school, long since abandoned. They swept the courtyard
clean of glass and got to work.

Most modern explosives get their power from compounds that have
complex nitrogen bonds. Ammonium nitrate, one of the world's most
prevalent fertilisers, fits the bill. It can be obtained in large
quantities and, due to its low cost, is used widely as an explosive
in mining and quarrying. It's a favourite of terrorists and
guerrillas.

"Any peasant can obtain it," Yassin tells me at the school. We
walk into one of the classrooms, which has been entirely emptied of
furniture. Instead, 50kg sacks of Turkish fertiliser sit stacked
against the far wall, surrounded by empty artillery shells and
lengths of aluminium piping -- future bomb-casings. An older man
and two young boys -- they can't be more than 12 -- are at work
without gloves or masks. With a shovel, they mix an enormous pile
of grey powder; a fine particulate suspension hangs in the air,
illuminated by rays of light through the glassless windows. Several
additives are mixed with ammonium nitrate to boost the power of the
explosion. The most common is diesel fuel, but Yassin claims to
have a nine-part secret recipe that works far better; the one key
ingredient he'll reveal is powdered aluminium, hence the silver
dust on his hands and arms. He casts an expert eye over the pile.
It hasn't been completely blended yet, and I can still pick out
many of the constituent parts by their colour and texture: whitish
fertiliser, chunky grains of TNT, black ground charcoal, silver
aluminium dust.

Local residents search for survivors after a regime air-strike in Aleppo

Moises Saman

In the jargon of explosives engineering, ammonium nitrate is
"insensitive", which means it's difficult to detonate. Think about
a campfire: you need to burn paper and then kindling before the
flames are hot enough to consume thick wood. Bombs are much the
same. You need a "primary" explosive, some highly sensitive
substance that reacts in contact with a burning fuse or an
electrical spark. Yassin and his brother used Google to find
instructions for making common primary explosives such as mercury
fulminate and lead azide. Then, taking over the school's chemistry
lab, they tested the recipes. One day when Ali and some others were
making mercury fulminate, the stuff exploded on them. Four men lost
eyes and fingers, and Ali's face and arms were peppered with glass
shards. Since then, Yassin has tried to source commercial blasting
caps from Turkey whenever he can.

When Yassin and Ali started the katiba, their first product was
a basic hand-grenade that the rebels could use in close-quarter
urban combat. They packed the explosives, along with steel tailings
that would turn into deadly shrapnel, into plastic tubing, then
inserted a detonator and booster charge. Once they'd mastered
elementary bomb-making, they turned to more complex devices. There
were large bombs, for example, made from empty fire extinguishers
or propane tanks, which could be buried and then triggered by wire.
There were antitank mines with charges that cut through vehicle
armour -- a lethal technology that had been devastating to American
forces in Iraq.

I ask about one odd-looking, 4.5-metre-long wooden
trebuchet, which its proud creator is using to hurl 2kg
fragmentation bombs. He tells me he got the idea from the video
game Age of Empires

But as winter went on and bodies filled the streets, Yassin
dreamed of bolder inventions. In January, Yassin got hold of a
machine shop in the old city. In the school hallway, there is an
olive-green 75mm mortar, newly arrived from his shop. "This is the
work of months of development," Yassin says, patting the mortar.
"It takes eight days to polish the inside of the tube." Indeed, the
interior of the barrel is perfectly smooth, and the tube connects
to its stand with a pair of greased threads; the mortar shells have
been painted and finely milled.

Yassin is selling it for around £350 -- cheap, considering that
a professional one on Aleppo's black market would cost thousands of
dollars. Yassin isn't trying to make much of a profit. Once he
masters a device, he keeps trying to find less expensive ways to
manufacture it. With the homemade grenades, he has been able to cut
costs by using steel tailings he gets for free from a generator
factory. That has brought the unit cost of each grenade down to the
equivalent of £2, which is exactly what he sells them for.

I ask him what he plans to make next. He rummages around in the
principal's desk before pulling out a small brass device and
handing it to me. "Take a look at this," he says. I turn it over in
my hand. It looks like a plumbing fitting.

I hand it back to him, asking what it's for. He points to a
stack of metal objects in the corner, shaped like old-fashioned
fire-alarm bells. They are what are known in military parlance as
victim-operated improvised explosive devices -- land mines to you
and me.

Among the Syrian rebels, Yassin is far from alone in applying
his ingenuity to homemade weapons. More than in any of the other
Arab nations riven by war in recent years, Syria's rebels have
taken a DIY approach to arming themselves. This has been born out
of a combination of necessity and uncommon opportunity, as rebels
have been able to hold territory where workshops can be set up.
Though regional countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar have
supplied arms to the rebels -- and the US
decided in June to begin its own limited programme -- weapons
have been scarce enough that the rebels continue to manufacture
their own. The whole region around Aleppo, which had been the
centre of Syria's heavy industry, quickly became particularly
fertile ground; as the rebels captured machine shops, steel mills,
and power plants, they began adapting them for war.

Some of the rebels' creations verge on the outlandish. I ask
about one odd-looking, 4.5-metre-long wooden trebuchet, which its
proud creator is using to hurl 2kg fragmentation bombs. He tells me
he got the idea from the video game Age of Empires.
Another Aleppo inventor gained fame with an armoured car called
Sham II. Two crew-members sit inside the car, an old diesel chassis
with steel panels welded to the outside, and look at TV screens. As
one drives, the other uses a PlayStation controller to aim and fire
a roof-mounted machine-gun.

With a snap, Mohammed releases the grenade -- but the
angle is too low. We hear the metallic clink of the bomb, that £2
staple of the Military Engineering Katiba, hitting the courtyard
wall and bouncing back at us

The demands of fighting Assad's army have resulted in some
limited coalescence among the rebel katibas. In many areas, they
have banded together into larger units called liwwas, Arabic for
brigades. These units handle logistics for their subordinate
katibas, sourcing weapons and materials from Turkey and Jordan, and
setting up factories. The liwwas also barter and trade weapons and
expertise among themselves.

In Aleppo, I meet Abu Mahmoud Affa, a former house-painter who
now commands a liwwa called Shield of the Nation. He is wearing
camo fatigues and chain-smoking in his office, another abandoned
school. With his big frame, belly and bushy white beard, he looks
like a cross between Che Guevara and Santa Claus. His bulk is
accentuated by his pixie-faced 12-year-old son, Mahmoud, who totes
an M-16 some two-thirds his height.

Affa agrees to drive me to one of the factories his men have set
up, on the condition that I wear a blindfold. With a scarf wrapped
around my face, I feel the car twist and turn as we speed through
Aleppo's narrow streets. Soon the hubbub of traffic and pedestrians
dies off, replaced by the sound of machine-gun fire. At last the
car stops and I am pulled out, and told to walk, Affa's big hands
guiding me.

"Who is this motherfucker?" Someone thinks I'm a prisoner.

"He's a journalist," Affa says. The blindfold is lifted. I'm in
a narrow one-room shop with a low ceiling and roller blinds on the
front. Several fighters sit on mats with their weapons, smoking and
regarding me with curiosity. Affa leads me toward the back of the
shop, where the rebels have bashed a hole in the concrete. We duck
through it, and I find myself in a second shop, dominated by a
massive central lathe and a collection of machine tools.

Affa introduces me to Abu Abed, a slender, balding man who
presides over the shop. Before the rebellion, he worked at a
munitions plant near Al-Safira, south of the city, where the
government made everything from bullets to helicopter-launched
rockets. When he defected to the rebels, he brought his knowledge
of weapons manufacturing with him. Shield of the Nation has a
network of small factories like this one, each focused on different
components. "We work one item at a time and make a few hundred of
them before moving on to the next," Abed says.

This factory doubles as a head office of sorts, where the others
send their pieces for assembly. It's also where Abed and his
colleagues try new designs. Most of the equipment is from an
auto-transmission workshop. Despite the fact that they're working
with explosives, everyone is smoking. No one here bothers with eye
or ear protection. "Now we're making a piece for the mortar," Abed
says. The mortar is the liwwa's pride; they reverse-engineered a
captured 82mm Russian model.

Aside from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and grenades,
their most popular item is a short-range rocket similar in design
to the ones developed by Palestinian militants in Gaza. To make the
rockets, they cut the U-joints off the ends of car driveshafts,
later reusing them to join the mortar tube to its baseplate. After
determining the mortar's range -- usually 2km -- the rebels use
Google Maps to pick a suitable spot that sits the same distance
from their target. They take the rocket there, use a compass to aim
it, and then fire.

After blindfolding me again, Affa walks me out to the car. By
the time I get back to my neighbourhood in Aleppo it's dark, and I
lie on a mat on the floor of my borrowed apartment, listening to a
city at war with itself. The regime is shelling the town, and the
rebels are firing back, but I can sense myself on one side of a
more visceral divide -- those who fire blindly into the dark and
those who wait fearfully within it.

Abu Yassin has made a promotional video for his Military
Engineering Katiba. It begins with a montage of clips of his work
-- bombs exploding, beakers smoking, circuits and IEDs being
assembled -- accompanied by a dramatic orchestral track that sounds
like it was ripped from a videogame. Then Yassin appears, sitting
in a darkened room in front of a window, such that only his
silhouette is visible. He looks like a super-villain. A Syrian
rebel flag hangs above his shadow. "In the name of God the most
gracious and most merciful," he begins, and then goes on to list
the weapons that his shop produces.

Yassin sees the video as a sort of marketing instrument, one
that he can show to the rebel commanders who flock to him for
weapons. He's proud of what he has achieved on his own, without
help from wealthy Arab donors or foreign intelligence services.
"Nobody can tell me what to do!" he exclaims one day as we sit in
the principal's office. He is wearing the same grease-darkened
scarf and gray tracksuit he had on when we first met. He rubs his
eyes and calls for another cup of black coffee -- he seems never to
sleep. "And they all need me."

Some of his inventions have failed. He tried to modify
remote-controlled model aeroplanes to carry video cameras so he
could use them as spy drones. But he couldn't build the gear light
enough for the planes to fly above the range of small-arms fire.
Then there's that claw-armed robot, which Yassin and some
engineering students spent two weeks assembling, based on a design
from a Japanese website. "We were forced to make our own circuits,"
he explains, "and they had less capability than the ones the design
called for." He dreamed of using the claw to retrieve weapons or
even wounded men on the battlefield, but the robot never worked
well enough to deploy.

Yassin seems to believe that anything can be accomplished with
the right combination of gadgetry. "There's one kind of circuit
that I'm looking for," he says, "that will allow the rockets to
track aircraft by seeking their heat." It's a self-conception that
harks back to an older, pre-corporate ideal of the heroic solo
inventor, like those of the golden age of American innovation in
the days of Thomas Edison, or the kind satirised in the 1980s by
the breakfast-making contraption at the beginning of Back to
the Future.

For all his technological enthusiasm, Yassin at times betrays
how deeply his lethal new trade troubles him. "These things are for
killing people," he tells me once, in sudden disgust. "Every time I
make a bomb, I feel sorrow." He hopes that eventually, in the
new Syria, the one that he will help to build, he will find
justification for his bloodied hands. "I'm tired of talking about
death," he tells me one day. He announces that he is planning a new
project called Amar (Arabic for "Works") to revitalise the moribund
and devastated city after the war. As part of this effort, he says,
he has invented a new strain of bread yeast and a new kind of
quick-drying cement. He wants to produce cleaning chemicals. He
will make enough to supply the whole city. He will build as many
factories as necessary. And the labour force? Why, the streets of
Aleppo will be filled with unemployed men! "Working in such a
factory will give them a purpose again and make them feel hope," he
says, eyes flashing. As for when Amar can begin, he is vague. In
the meantime, he is left to feed and tend a machine that sucks in
explosive material and spits out mangled bodies.

Curious to see his products in action, I visit a band of rebels
he supplies in Aleppo's old city. The buildings have high, thick
stone walls and interior courtyards, which, coupled with the narrow
streets and maze-like layout, make them ideal havens for urban
guerrillas. In the courtyard of a stone house in the Kastel Harami
district, I meet with Abu Mohammed, a rebel leader affiliated
with Ahrar al-Suria, or the Freemen of Syria. Mohammed's house is a
well-appointed dwelling with grape vines, bronze wind chimes and a
small tortoise. The commander himself is squatting in the courtyard
when we arrive, busily pouring a mixture of industrial adhesive and
gasoline into a collection of empty Nutella jars.

He shows me some rockets and a crate of homemade mortar shells;
a grocery bag brims with spherical metal grenades the size of
oranges, also homemade, with fuses sticking out of their tops, like
bombs in a cartoon. After filling the rest of the jars, Mohammed
and his men gather their rifles and head into the street. We wind
through the dense geometry of the old city; down a narrow alley,
then into a courtyard, then through a hole bashed in the courtyard
wall into a small cavity between the houses, then across a plank to
another roof. We descend into a third courtyard, where a group of
rebels waits for us. They have assault rifles, as well as a couple
of grenade launchers and a light machine gun. The attack is about
to begin.

Mohammed motions for me to follow him up a set of stairs at the
far end of the courtyard. On a second-storey terrace, a rebel waits
next to a 2.4-metre-high metal stand shaped like a Y with a loop of
elastic dangling from it. It's a giant slingshot. The attendant
rebel introduces himself as Abu Zakaria. He hefts a grenade from a
shopping bag. "Angry Birds," he says in English, laughing.

Bullets snap overhead. Zakaria pats the wall we have our backs
against. The regime soldiers are 15 metres that way, he tells
me.

From the opposite side of the terrace, another group of rebels
comes running, yelling for us to take cover. The previous night,
they snuck up and planted a massive IED against the foundation of
the house the regime soldiers were occupying. Now they are going to
detonate it. We crouch and stick fingers in our ears just before an
enormous blast

Now it is time to engage the slingshot. Mohammed places a
grenade in the band and draws it back tight, squatting on his
haunches, clenching it with all his might. Zakaria puts a cigarette
lighter to the fuse. With a snap, Mohammed releases the grenade --
but the angle is too low. We hear the metallic clink of the bomb,
that £2 staple of the Military Engineering Katiba, hitting the
courtyard wall and bouncing back at us.

In the Salaheddine district of Aleppo, the body of a rebel is taken for burial

Moises Saman

Everyone scrambles to escape. My only option is the bathroom, so
I dive into it, sliding face-first on the cool tiling. Another
rebel jumps in on top of me just before we feel the violent
concussion of the grenade, which strikes me not as sound but as
silence. For a full minute, the world is quiet. Then men's voices
fade in, sounding like faraway radio chatter. Gradually I begin to
hear again. Miraculously, no one is hurt.

Mohammed and Zakaria go right back to the slingshot and begin
lobbing grenades toward the regime lines, this time successfully.
After exhausting their supply, Mohammed waves for everyone to pull
back to the lower courtyard, where they gather in a circle and
chant "God is great!" After that we retreat another hundred metres
into an alley. The assault has ended as abruptly as it began.
Instead of pressing the attack, the rebels break for an hour for
lunch.

When they return to the front line, the rebels are greeted with
fresh machine-gun fire: the regime soldiers have regrouped. Neither
the first rebel IED nor a second one has succeeded in collapsing
their house. A group of rebels runs down the alley with a
young compatriot, his face pale and taut. He has been shot
through the thigh, and as they heft him into a waiting van and try
to improvise a tourniquet, a bright arterial jet spurts crimson on
to the cobblestones.

Afterward, Zakaria rests against the stone wall, fingers probing
the skin of his trembling brow. "We've been fighting in this same
position for three months," he says. "But tomorrow we'll advance,
God willing."

On my last night in Aleppo, I go for a final visit with Abu
Yassin. Although it's late March, the weather is still cold, and
that evening has brought rain. There is no power in most of the
city, and as I approach the school, the waxy yellow of its
generator-powered light stands out through the drizzle. One of
Yassin's henchmen opens the gate; the bomb maker is sick, he tells
me.

I find Yassin in the principal's office, slumped into a sofa. He
makes a feeble attempt to get up. "Sorry," he says, then coughs
wetly. He has been bedridden with fever for two days.

I have a few questions about his manufacturing, but he turns the
conversation to Amar, his yeast and cement factories, his grandiose
plans for the new Syria. He wants to show me something, he says. It
is a picture of him before the war, in a suit and tie,
clean-shaven. The bearded and keffiyeh-wearing man in front of me
is almost unrecognisable as the same man. We both laugh.

"I hate this," he says, glancing around his room full of
weapons. "Do you know what my dream is?" He waits for a moment, and
I shrug. I have heard all about the glorious future he
envisions.

"My dream," he says, "is to go to a café with my friends. And
then to walk home slowly and find my wife and children asleep."

An incoming mortar round whistles outside; then, down the
street, a distant thump.

"We hope that this bad dream is going to end," he says. He
sweeps his hands around the principal's office. "This is a school!
Where are the children? Where are they?"

He looks at me and forces a grin. "But I am hopeful for the
future. Syria can be a great country again. Our labourers built
half the Gulf countries. They can build our own."

Yassin insists on walking me to the front gate himself. There is
a vacant lot across the road from the school; beyond that stands a
line of four-storey apartment buildings, with one missing. A regime
jet had dropped a bomb on it earlier today, burying three families.
Despite his illness, Yassin helped supervise the rescue
operation.

"It will be fine," Yassin says again, gazing out across the
empty lot. "You just… have to think!" he says in his broken
English, stabbing his fingers toward his temple, the man of reason
asserting his control over destiny. "You can do anything if you
think." A new chain of explosions flickers on the horizon like
faraway lightning. Yassin's face relaxes.